Planned Parenthood Pasadena and San Gabriel Valley hosted its annual Fall Benefit at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena on Saturday.

Hundreds of donors, advocates, and community and business leaders turned out for the event, which marks the organization’s 85th anniversary serving 24 communities. Stephanie Dencik and Stephanie McLemore served as the event’s co-chairs; Sheri Bonner is the local organization’s CEO.

Emcee Cristela Alonso shared her stories of finding care as a Latina and local high school students Amanda Estevez and Nick Sanchez brought the audience to their feet with their transformative experiences as Peer Advocates, serving as resources for sexual and reproductive health information in their schools and communities.

Other speakers included Dave Quast, PP Advocates board member and long-time advocate, and Dr. Leah Torres, a Utah-based OB/GYN whose health advocacy had helped bridge divides across conservative and progressive communities, states and countries.

My mom loves me. But she also “likes” me—a lot. And apparently, when she does so on Facebook, it’s hurting my chances of becoming the next viral sensation.

On his blog, engineer Chris Aldrich explains what he calls The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem. When you post something on Facebook, and your mom is the first to like it (and how can she not? she’s your mom!), Facebook thinks it’s a family-related piece of content and sets the audience accordingly.

I write my content on my own personal site. I automatically syndicate it to Facebook. My mom, who seems to be on Facebook 24/7, immediately clicks “like” on the post. The Facebook algorithm immediately thinks that because my mom liked it, it must be a family related piece of content–even if it’s obviously about theoretical math, a subject in which my mom has no interest or knowledge. (My mom has about 180 friends on Facebook; 45 of them overlap with mine and the vast majority of those are close family members).

The algorithm narrows the presentation of the content down to very close family. Then my mom’s sister sees it and clicks “like” moments later. Now Facebook’s algorithm has created a self-fulfilling prophesy and further narrows the audience of my post. As a result, my post gets no further exposure on Facebook other than perhaps five people–the circle of family that overlaps in all three of our social graphs.

I, too, have a like-happy mom. Two seconds after I post a story I’ve written—say, a 3,000-word piece on state-imposed no-fishing zones—my mom will like it. She hasn’t read it, and probably never will, but she likes seeing her daughter’s face on her computer, and really, who can protest the unconditional support? But because of her eager click, Facebook lumps the content in with my photos of Baby’s First Avocado, and shows it only to a small group of family members.

Until Facebook stops penalizing mom auto-likes, Aldrich writes that you can sidestep the problem with a little extra effort. Here’s how to make sure your Facebook posts reach an audience beyond Mom, Aunt Susie and Uncle Ken in Kansas.

1) Set the privacy settings of your post to either “Friends except mom” or “Public except mom.”

I know what you’re thinking. How awful! How can you do that to your own mother? Did you know that birthing you took 38 hours? Millennials!

Wait, wait, wait, everyone. There’s a step two.

2) At the end of the day, or as soon as it seems as though the post reached its maximum audience, change the audience settings to “friends” or “public.” Aldrich has been doing this, and has been seeing more impressions on his posts. “I’m happy to report that generally the intended audience which I wanted to see the post actually sees it,” he writes. “Mom just gets to see it a bit later.”

I'm currently reading the book Kill Process by William Hertling. It's about murder, privacy, hacking, high tech surveillance and data mining. The book is great and I can recommend it to everybody who likes tech thrillers. Hertling gets the technical background and hacker stuff of the story really good together. Angie, the heroine, works at Tomo, the largest and quasi-monopoly Facebook-like social network as a database programmer. Part of the story is her ambition to create an alternative to the centralized privacy nightmare the Tomo service became. So she decides to do something about it and plans to build a distributed, federated social network of networks. She also meets and joins with people familiar with the IndieWeb concept. That's when I was reminded of how good the idea really is.

More than 400 guests attended Johns Hopkins convocations in San Francisco and Burbank in March, hearing from President William R. Brody and other outstanding faculty speakers about developments at Johns Hopkins. The Southern California convocation, held at the Walt Disney Studios, was hosted by University trustee John F. Cooke, Disney's executive vice president-corporate affairs.

During the convocation luncheon at the Disney Commissary in Burbank, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, A&S ’66, at left, talks with Chris Aldrich, A&S ’96. At right is James Neal, the Sheridan Director of Homewood’s Eisenhower Library and one of the event speakers.After his computer music performance at the Southern California convocation, Peabody’s Forrest Tobey is surrounded by admirers as he explains his use of arm gestures to trigger sounds stored in the synthesizer.In Pasadena on the evening before the Southern California convocation, President Brody meets Los Angeles area alumni and friends at a dinner hosted by University trustee Charles D. Miller. Here he talks with Dr. and Mrs. J. Michael Criley, at left, and Dr. and Mrs. Richard Call.

MSE Symposium Unspools Tuesday at Shriver Hall
At 100, Why Do Movies Matter?
Mike Giuliano
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Special to The Gazette
Not that turf-conscious professors need worry about one of the main campus buildings being converted into a nine-screen multiplex theater, but the movies have arrived on the Homewood campus in a big way.
Most immediately, the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium, "Framing Society: A Century of Cinema," opens this week to examine the roles of the motion pictures in American society. Its undergraduate co-chairmen, Matt Gross and Chris Aldrich, are no strangers to the subject of film. Each is involved in film classes, student film organizations, film production, screenings and a just-launched magazine. All of which, considered together with the symposium, they hope will provide a new frame of reference at Hopkins for the only art form that proceeds at 24 frames per second.
Lest anyone still harbor the prejudice that movies should be accompanied by popcorn and not term papers, young filmmaker Gross is quick to defend the academic worth of their symposium offering.
"Chris and I always felt it was an appropriate topic for the symposium," he says. "It wasn't so much deciding whether to do it as how to do it. We want to explore how cinema fits into our culture. Can a particular movie or stream of movies change things in society?"
By way of example, he dips into film and political history for the famous anecdote about President Woodrow Wilson's proclamation that D.W. Griffith's controversial 1915 film Birth of a Nation was "like history written by lightning."
Gross says, "It's a historical fact that Wilson was one of the first people to give legitimacy to film. Since he went to Hopkins, he's like this guy sitting on top of the ivory tower saying this is a way of reporting history. That legitimizes film as a historical pursuit. And the 100th anniversary of cinema is an opportunity to look back on film in a cultural and intellectual way."
Gross adds that a visit to Paris reinforced his sense that the French, whose visionary Lumière brothers began showing movies commercially in 1895, have a much keener sense of film history than do Americans.
"It's not just that Americans don't have a grasp of film history. There's not a good grasp of history among the American people," he says.
There's yet another reason why Gross believes movies haven't always received the respect they deserve in this country.
"Also, possibly, the business of film has gotten in the way somewhat," he says. "Because it is big business--it's a product--some people may not feel it's worth looking at" in an academic forum, he says.
Gross looks on this year's symposium as a springboard for a broader discussion, both on campus and in the larger community, of the role played by movies.
"The symposium is a way to get everybody who is interested together in one place to talk about movies. Beyond the symposium, we're trying to create at Hopkins a kind of cinematic culture. And we need to expand so that the Baltimore public knows about what's at Hopkins," Gross says. "Being on campus for four years, everything feels so isolated. Many students know a lot about film but not always about what's going on off campus, and people off campus in Baltimore know about film but not about what we have here.
"We'd like to integrate Hopkins into the Baltimore community at large. We want to be a regular part of the movie scene. So we want the symposium to act as a catalyst for everything else," he says.
One impact the symposium will have on and off campus will result from the outfitting of Shriver Hall with a new 38-foot screen.
"The old screen had been subjected to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and other things," says Mary Ellen Porter, special assistant to dean of students Larry Benedict. The film is noted as much for its campy content as for its cult following, who make viewing the film an interactive experience replete with vegetables and other substances tossed at the screen.
Also added were 35mm film projectors, and there are plans to add "surround sound" equipment next year. These technical enhancements will make the 1,174-seat hall the largest and potentially one of the best movie theaters in the Baltimore area.
Existing film series such as the long-running Reel World and Weekend Wonderflix will look better on screen. Porter says the booking of preview screenings and other special programs "will give us a chance to reach out to the greater community in a way we don't now."
Better campus screening facilities can enhance both a weekend date for the latest Die Hard movie and a student taking notes on the mise-en-scène in a Renoir film.
"In terms of facilities, film is a machine art and machines are a part of it," notes Richard Macksey, a longtime Hopkins professor of humanities and film and an active member of Baltimore's cinema culture. He cites the upgrading of 110 Gilman several years ago as an instance of how film courses prosper when projection moves closer to state of the art.
Indeed, the cinematic zeitgeist on campus seems healthy. Last summer saw the birth of yet another film series, The Snark, which offers classics and avant-garde fare. Also recently arrived on the screen scene is the Animation Club.
The recently established Johns Hopkins Film Society and its magazine, Frame of Reference, promote film culture at Hopkins, including criticism, theory, history and production. Mardi Gras Baltimore, co-directed by Gross and 1995 graduate Gil Jawetz, will premiere at the symposium at 8 p.m. on Nov. 15.
Gross hopes the diversity of symposium speakers will provide the insights and inspiration to support and nourish the
confluence of Hopkins' film-related activities.
For example, James G. Robinson, founder and CEO of Morgan Creek Productions, will talk about the business of making movies. Veteran screenwriter Millard Kaufman and young director Rose Troche will each talk about their place within that industry. Critic Molly Haskell will talk about the role played by women in filmmaking and criticism. And Thomas Cripps, among the world's leading scholars of black film history, will add his reflections on the representation of blacks in the movies and the social effects of those images.
It's a lineup that has won over at least one initial skeptic.
"Frankly, I was a little skeptical of it at first because a lot of money goes into [the symposium], and I didn't want to see speakers who'd stand up there schmoozing and then vanish into the night," says English professor Jerome Christensen, who directs the Film and Media Studies program.
Established in 1991, Film and Media Studies is a cooperative program of the departments of English, French, German, Hispanic and Italian Studies, Writing Seminars, Humanities and Philosophy. Presently, students may minor in this area, but Christensen expects that the eventual addition of a film production course will enable students to major in Film and Media Studies. Although he says Hopkins "will never be a film school" on the scale of New York University or the University of Southern California, it is taking its place with other academic pursuits at Homewood.
"I'm glad [Gross and Aldrich] have used [the symposium] in a way that will be educational," Christensen says. "I'm hoping the symposium will demonstrate the range of opportunities both in terms of careers and the intellectual challenges that contemporary film represents. It also gives us a push to do other things."
Christensen suggests the symposium visit of Indian filmmaker Girish Karnad will likely figure into classroom discussions in a course on Indian film being offered in the spring. Undergraduate internships with Robinson also are under discussion.
"My aim is to have some institutional pay-off to these things," he says.
"Film is especially adaptable to an interdisciplinary approach and it's used for so many pedagogical purposes now," says Macksey of the Hopkins approach to teaching film. Having mentored such future Hollywood talents as Walter Murch and Caleb Deschanel during their student days in the 1960s, Macksey has been a constant advocate for film studies on campus.
And what would the students like to see on the classroom screen scene in the semesters ahead?
"I'd like to consider how the film study is done at New York University, Columbia, USC and elsewhere and then find a different and original way to go at it at Hopkins," Gross says. "Many of those film schools examine how movies are made and not as much attention is paid to movies as literature. That's something Hopkins can do."

The moving picture turns 100 this year and some Johns Hopkins University undergraduates who can’t picture life without a big screen have marked film’s centennial by bringing to the Homewood campus an impressive group of movie industry insiders to discuss the powerful medium of film.

The 1995 Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium, “Framing Society: A Century of Cinema” will be held in Shriver Hall at 8 p.m. on different nights from Oct. 10 through Nov. 16, and is entirely free and open to the public.

James Robinson, founder and CEO of Morgan Creek Productions, will discuss the movie-making business in the series kick-off event Oct. 10. Since 1988 Robinson has produced at least 26 films, including Young Guns I and II, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Enemies: a Love Story, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and True Romance. Last year Robinson, a Baltimore resident who commutes every week to the West Coast, was named the most prolific producer of the year by Hollywood Reporter Magazine.

Also during the series, an independent film maker will discuss the recent boom in independent, low-budget films while another director will talk
about the importance of her identity as a Latina lesbian and her struggle not to be pegged as a “queer” director. Other speakers will discuss the portrayal of African-Americans and women in movies, and one of India’s leading directors will discuss the international movie scene.

Symposium organizers say another highlight will be a lecture given by veteran screenwriter Millard Kaufman. Kaufman, 78, has weathered the ups and downs of the film industry for decades and his colorful, tell-it-like-it-is style is as entertaining as it is enlightening. Besides writing memorable Lee Marvin and Spencer Tracy westerns like Bad Day at Black Rock and Take the High Ground, he is also known for risking his career by fronting the screenplay Gun Crazy for a blacklisted friend during the McCarthy era. Still, Kaufman is probably most famous for creating the quirky and comical cartoon character Mr. Magoo.

During the symposium, Hopkins will also hold the grand opening of the Shriver Hall Theater in Shriver Hall Auditorium, which will be outfitted with state-of-the-art screening capabilities, making it the largest movie theater in the Baltimore-Washington area. In the future, the new theater will host movie premieres and sneak previews as well as off-beat and foreign films.

The Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium was established in 1967 by Hopkins’ undergraduate student council to honor the university’s eighth president.
Every year since then, a team of two to three students chosen by the student council has arranged and managed all aspects of the series. Usually about six prominent figures are booked to address a current national issue.

Covering topics like the nuclear arms race, human sexuality, freedom of the press and foreign policy and race, the symposium has been drawn speakers like Aaron Copland, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Bernstein, former senators George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, Pat Robinson and Isaac Asimov.

This year’s symposium organizers are Hopkins seniors Chris Aldrich and Matt Gross. Gross and fellow Hopkins senior Gil Jawetz have also produced and directed a short film, Mardi Gras, Baltimore, which will premiere during the symposium.

Friday, Nov. 17, 8 p.m.
Premiere and screening.
World premiere of Mardi Gras, Baltimore, written, produced and directed by JHU students Gil Jawetz and Matt Gross. Screening of Laws of Gravity, produced by Larry Meistrich.

He directs the Reel World film series, a long-standing weekly feature at Homewood during the academic year. Along with fellow film junkie Matthew Gross, he is chairing the 1995 Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium celebrating the first 100 years of motion pictures, which is always an incredibly labor-intensive student-run project.

And to fill up those lazy summer days, he has created the Snark Summer Film Festival–106 feature films in 45 consecutive days–from June 16 through July 30.

All screenings are free.

The nightly dose of double (and sometime triple) features will be held at Shriver Hall, at Homewood, with the first film beginning promptly at 8 p.m. Generally a few short films will start the evening, and there will be a five-minute intermission between feature films.

The following is the tentative schedule for the Snark Summer Film Festival. For a complete listing and to confirm dates, films and times, call (410) 516-8666.

Friday, June 16: Bogart
Casablanca,
The Big Sleep

Saturday, June 17: American Classics
The Great Train Robbery,
Citizen Kane,
Stagecoach

Sunday, June 18: Polanski
Two Men and a Wardrobe,
Knife in the Water,
Cul-De-Sac

Monday, June 19: Godard
All the Boys Are Named Patrick,
Alphaville,
Masculine-Feminine

Tuesday, June 20: German Expressionism
The Student of Prague,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
The Golem: How He Came into the World